John Bowden

About

John Bowden studied linguistics and anthropology in his undergraduate career at the University of Auckland, where he also completed an M.A. in linguistics. He did his PhD in linguistics at the University of Melbourne where he wrote a grammar of Taba, an Austronesian language of eastern Indonesia. After a year as a post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, he took up a position as a research fellow in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. Since the beginning of 2010 John has been managing the Jakarta Field Station of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

He has research interests in linguistic typology and particularly in the description and documentation of Indonesian languages, both Austronesian and non-Austronesian. He is also interested in language contact and language change, and particularly in the emergence of new forms of language such as slang.